


Springheart

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Compare and Contrast, Emotional rebirth, Gen, Renewal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-08
Updated: 2015-01-08
Packaged: 2018-03-06 15:23:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3139268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a warm-up. I've got Most of the first round of sorting out done since Christmas came and rearranged my life so nicely. </p><p>Hope you have fun. It's just a round of playing two different men, each thinking himself "spent" in terms of life and feeling, suddenly realizing it ain't so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Springheart

When the other one died—his first love, his dearest—Mycroft thought his heart died with him. There was the crisp, clean pop of gunfire, the fraction of a second wondering who’d fired and who’d been hit…

Then the sight of his lover tumbling, joints sloppy and loose, face blank but for the dark bloom between his eyes and the trickle that ran down like a tear along his nose.

Another man might have salvaged a fraction of a second, a second, entire minutes of denial out of that event. Nanoseconds of extra time believing he loved and was loved in the present tense, not the past. Mycroft was not the sort to miss the implications, though. In the gasping instant of seeing, he knew.

It hit like a blow to the solar plexus. If he had a soul, that soul stopped breathing and didn’t know how to start again. The shock and the pain were too intense.

He stood, shocked and destroyed—then a bullet whizzed too close to his ear, and training and instinct took over, and he was running, dodging, dancing across the open terrain, heading for the fortification in which the sniper was hidden. Ten minutes later the barbed wire was cut, the locks blown, and Mycroft was in the little room alone with a dead sniper at his feet.

“The doctor’s done with him, now,” his superior had said much later, after the debriefing. “If you want to see him, he’s been cleaned up. He’s…decent.”

“He’s not decent, he’s dead,” Mycroft had responded, voice priggish and sour, sounding of Victorian spinsters and heliotrope-clad Aunts in P.G. Wodehouse stories.

At the funeral he commented that it was as well his lover had taken the bullet from the front, rather than behind.

“Because it shows he’s brave?” a rather young idiot had asked. “Not shot from behind, eh?”

Mycroft had sniffed, and glared, and said, “Don’t be ridiculous. This way he had a face left for an open casket viewing. Do you have any idea what an exit wound looks like? More mince than you’d see at the butcher’s.” Then he’d stalked away and poured himself a straight scotch, and no one had ventured to bring it up with him again.

Which was as well. He had no idea what to say. One minute he had been one person—a person with an entire thriving rainforest of emotional flora and fauna—the next wind-stripped tundra with little more than a few patches of scruffy furze and gorse left around his birth family to suggest he’d ever cared.

He assured himself it was better that way. He was, he discovered, very hard to manipulate. Very hard to blackmail. Very hard to intimidate. Charles Augustus Magnussen had tried it over and over again, and in all their years of jousting the man had never got it quite right until the end.

Mycroft could almost wish the man had lived to enjoy his little victory, rather than Sherlock having his blood on his hands. But one did not argue with what was past. It was a waste of energy.

Mycroft was no Job. He did not rend his clothes or pour ashes over his sores. Most of all, he did not contend with God.

“You have hollowed me out,” he said at night, when he prayed. “The wind blows over the holes you have left, and I sing your melody.”

He didn’t pray it often. Only on the nights he felt particularly empty: bored out. God’s own Aeolian harp, sending out stirring, restless melodies that spoke of trouble under heaven.

It is easier to live this way, he told himself. Caring was not an advantage.

 

 

Lestrade looked at himself, and concluded he was burnt to the soil line and below—nothing left to spring up green and growing when the fire had passed. His first love for his wife had been the first fire, sweeping through a happy, bohemian youth, scorching off the tangled, happy thickets of willow and sage and heather and gorse, leaving only the peat and the rolling moorland, and the great granite outcrops that shrugged up from the land like ships in a flotilla. He’d thought that was love, when it happened—the leaving behind of feverish boyhood fancies in favor of something clearer, harder, more pure under a sky spangled with the rise and drop, the circle and plummet of windhover and curlew and gull and crow and skylark.

That had been his marriage, he thought. Pure like a Puritan. Clean as the altars of the churches after Cromwell’s Roundhead Dissenters came through. Love needed no ornament but space and light, after all…

And when it did not work and he could never see why, he faltered. The moorlands seemed haunted, then, and hounds skulked the night and hid among the granite outcrops, and he found torn sparrow hawks on the dark, peaty soil, their pale feathers shivering in the wind, gummed together with their own blood. Sometimes he lost track of the real blood of his various jobs, and the metaphoric blood of his personal life. Then he remembered—the mysteries he encountered at work could be solved. Those of his marriage appeared to be unanswerable.

Years, he put in. It didn’t happen quickly, at any given moment. Or—not until the last moments.

Molly had said, “I thought you were going to be back in Dorset.”

Lestrade had responded, “That’s first thing in the morning, me and the wife. We’re back together. It’s all sorted.”

“No,” Sherlock said, with a blend of malice and apathy only Sherlock could come up with. “She’s sleeping with a P.E. teacher.”

And that was when Lestrade smelled the soot on the wind of his soul, saw the sparks and embers, and knew the blasted heath could be more lifeless still.

By the end of that night he’d have sworn there was nothing left but the wary, fond feelings he had for his team and Sherlock and not much more. All the rest was restless wind—long, flowing rivers of silence. A hissing void, and dust, and ash.

Clean, in its own way.

Oh, the deep, fertile water of the peat bogs remained. Sometimes something failntly human seemed to float under the surface. If he drank too much, or got too tired, he’d think he remembered what it was like before---the high moors alive with heather in bloom and birds tracing pagan spirals on the empty sky. The days before that, when the land had been covered in willow and beech and ash, and rabbits had hidden behind the blades of wild iris at the edge of ponds, and even the skeptical could imagine the possibility of nixies and dryads and other fey creatures run riot in the wildwood.

A night’s sleep and a cup of strong coffee sent the dreams away, though.

It was better that way.

 

The two men stood together, shoulder to shoulder in the lee of an alleyway.

“You dress rather better than I had realized,” Mycroft said, glancing sideways at the neat, if modest sport suit, the Burberry overcoat, and the neat wool scarf.

“And you don’t dress half so much like Bertie Wooster as I’d reckoned.” Lestrade allowed a grin to flicker as he glanced over at his counterpart. “Though the pocket square’s a bit over the top.”

“A carefully calculated bit over the top,” Mycroft said, firmly. “Just enough to convince them I’m a bit of a fool, not enough to overplay it.”

“A tactical coup, in that case.” Lestrade watched the figures walking in the park together—Sherlock and his friends. Mary and Molly and Mrs. Hudson played with the baby. John and Sherlock and Janine strode along behind, keeping watch. “Do you think they’ve come through safe, then?”

Mycroft sighed. “I try not to use the word ‘safe’ and ‘Sherlock' in the same sentence,” he said. “Indeed, I often manage to keep them separated by entire pages of prose. Sherlock and his tribe are born to trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward.”

Lestrade sighed, dark eyes sad. “You can only burn down so far,” he said. “Only so far.”

Mycroft grimaced. “I would have thought so. And, yet—they remind me of steppes ecologies. Somehow after each new wildfire, they come back to fresh growth.” He studied them, his own pale eyes worried. “I just worry that the heart’s hollowed out of them, over time. Nothing left to feel…”

Lestrade scoffed. “Sherlock and that lot? Hollow them out and the feelings will come back in faster than you can empty the space. No.” Then, wistfully, he said, “They’ve got that on me. I came to the end of myself. I burned down to sterile ground. They haven’t.”

Mycroft glanced sideward, then said, softly, “Oh, no. I assure you—you’ve not come to the end. You _live.”_ He met Lestrade’s eyes with hesitant admiration. “So rich. So fertile. Quiet, but live. Like bees in the heather, or dragonflies over the bog. Nothing dead or hollow about you.” He sighed, and looked away, following his younger brother’s pack as they ambled across the park. “He’s got music in him, and it’s not just the whistle of air over an empty jug.”

“Is that what you think you are? Just a groan of wind?” Lestrade sighed. “Git.”

Mycroft looked back, and Lestrade smiled, and reached out to tag the day’s pocket square—a tidy little origami swallow in iridescent green and blue silk, bursting from his jacket pocket. “If you’re wind, it’s full of feathers and bird song, you silly berk. You make me laugh.”

Afterward they would argue about it. Mycroft swore it happened in a moment, like the blaze and roar of a lightning bolt mere feet away, leaving the air bright and fresh and flush with ozone. Lestrade would swear it had crept up on them, wave after wave over the years bringing them together until one day each looked and realized the emptiness was once more full.

Then, having argued, they’d smile, because they were both right, and both wrong, and who cared anyway, when the world was young, and spring had come again, and life stirred in every leaf and bog, and the trees dripped rain, and the tree frogs peeped, and neither man was hollow, or sere any more….

That day, though, they clung together and kissed in an alley, by an overflowing trash skip, and got grime on their coats from the grubby brick walls, and didn’t give a damn, because that day— _that very moment_ —Sherlock and his tribe had nothing for them to envy, and no life for them to yearn after. That day earth’s gravity tipped its hat to them, and all the birds of London flew aerial parades to celebrate their rebirth.


End file.
